John May is founding partner in MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based architectural practice, and assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Signal. Image. Architecture. is a significant intervention into
discussions of both the “image” and the “digital” in architecture
and urbanism. John May poses questions about the novel forms of
actuarial and statistical life and about the new modalities of
territory and governmentality emerging today through imaging
infrastructures. As we turn to AI, big data, and predictive
analytics, our actions and our gestures are increasingly tied to
the training of machines, and we are left asking what
representation, gesture, and inscription can still do. This book
radically breaks from debates about when architecture became
digital or what the digital is. It instead speculates on the
aesthetic and political stakes of our imaging practices in design
and offers a manifesto for future potentialities.
*Orit Halpern, Concordia University*
John May’s Signal. Image. Architecture. puts a philosophical lens
on the practices of design. By keeping instruments front and
center, he pries apart writing, images, and photographs and drives
us to focus on the disciplined conduct of each. Front and center:
he zeroes in on the everyday and the highly technical forms of
making, processing, and sending design. Throughout this fascinating
study, May joins theory with concrete practice and, in so doing,
remakes familiar elements of the design world into fascinating,
urgent objects of our present.
*Peter Galison, Harvard University*
John May is an architect who theorizes and a theorist who designs,
and both with a philosophical and historical sensibility that
frames his understanding of the fluid conditions that shape present
architectural practice. Drawing from anthropology, media theory,
science and technology studies, and histories and theories of
vision and cybernetics, he has produced an archaeology of our
deepening immersion into the technics of electronic images over the
past three decades, and a “pathographic manifesto” of the hidden
political dimensions of contemporary image consciousness. This book
will resonate well beyond architecture to any field concerned with
cultural production, even as it asserts architecture’s centrality
in a world now defined by the endless circulation of electronic
images.
*K. Michael Hays, Harvard Graduate School of Design*
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